Vibe coding is increasingly being used to accelerate and automate business processes. Liantis primarily sees it as a personal productivity gain, provided employees learn to think in systems.
HR service provider Liantis works daily with various processes, ranging from document processing and time registration to signing forms. Such processes lend themselves to automation. John Helsmoortel, Chief Technology Officer at Liantis, outlines how vibe coding is used within the company and where the opportunities and pitfalls lie. He sees vibe coding primarily as a tool for developing small applications that can take over administrative tasks, but “not to mimic large applications like Outlook or Office”.
Vibe Coding
According to Helsmoortel, vibe coding enables non-programmers to create applications nonetheless. “This isn’t about applications like a customer portal with more than a hundred thousand users,” he clarifies. “Within our company, we see vibe coding primarily as a tool to improve personal and team productivity.”
He shows us an example of his own timesheet tool created through vibe coding. “It’s a monthly, tedious task that I easily automated via vibe coding to create more personal productivity gains and eliminate small irritations,” he says.
Two levels
He distinguishes two levels of vibe coding. “Most people start by asking ChatGPT to write a piece of code for a specific application. Then they paste that code into their PC and try the application out. If there’s an error message, the code goes back to the AI. You get a bit wiser, but not more efficient: the user themselves is the bottleneck.”
A step further is what Helsmoortel calls ‘yolo mode’. “In this mode, you describe your problem in great detail to an AI application like Claude, ask it to look at it from different angles via agents, and have it draw up a single implementation plan. Then you feed a model with that plan, with the instruction: only disturb me if necessary.”
“By writing the right prompts, you essentially assemble your own team. That team consists of various agents, each taking on a specific role: a technical one, but just as easily a marketing agent. Suppose you want to build a webshop for a perfume store; you let different agents work together on that task, each from their own perspective, until a concrete list of work emerges to get started with.”
Chef in the kitchen
Within the IT team, Liantis shares self-built applications via internal group chats. “These are, for example, tools that merge data from different systems, so employees no longer have to search in five places but find everything in one location.”
These applications are not yet being offered to the more than two thousand other employees. The reason is that Liantis performs very precise work: if a self-employed person wants to adjust their social security contribution, the governance around it must be watertight.
Liantis wants to open up vibe coding beyond the IT team, but under strict conditions: “No customer applications, not externally accessible, and the developer remains responsible for what they launch.”
Whoever launches an application is responsible for it.
John Helsmoortel, Chief Technology Officer at Liantis
Helsmoortel summarizes the latter as the ‘chef in the kitchen’ model: “In a large restaurant kitchen, several people work, but only one person is responsible for the quality of what ends up on the plate.” To support employees in this, Liantis wants to provide tooling that continuously scans vibe-coded applications for security and checks if the followed process is correct.
Maintenance underestimated
Building an application is one thing, but the fact that it also requires maintenance is often forgotten. “You must be very aware that you also maintain what you build afterwards. That is a part that is more difficult for many people,” says Helsmoortel. “If you then don’t look at the application for six months and there’s a problem, that’s when the real work begins.”
Costs & security
In addition to maintenance, the cost factor should not be underestimated. “Vibe-coded applications are not always as cost-efficient as solutions built with traditional code,” he states.
A non-technical user quickly judges a tool as working or not working, but the analysis often stops there. A good application must also be cost-efficient, secure, and scalable. “Anyone who thinks vibe coding makes the IT department redundant is wrong,” Helsmoortel emphasizes.
Anyone who thinks vibe coding makes the IT department redundant is wrong.
John Helsmoortel, Chief Technology Officer at Liantis
However, Liantis is not alone. “We are proud to support Liantis with a strong platform on which all their digital activities run. This gives Liantis a secure, scalable, and reliable foundation, allowing teams to focus on their core activities and continue to innovate,” says Robin Joncheere, Managing Director Belgium at NTT DATA.
AI Augmented development
The IT department can also achieve efficiency gains thanks to vibe coding. For instance, Liantis is focusing on AI augmented development, where existing software teams work faster thanks to AI.
Helsmoortel illustrates this with an example: “The comparison that comes to mind is that of a hand drill versus a cordless drill: the result is the same, but the efficiency is much higher. We see a productivity gain of two to seven times, depending on the task.”
“With the platform, Liantis can accelerate AI initiatives from experiment to industrial application: allowing it to shorten time-to-market, scale new use cases faster, and translate technological investments into concrete business results,” says Joncheere.
Here to stay
“Vibe coding is here to stay. We don’t want to stop it, but rather stimulate it in our environment. This does require employees to think in systems. If you automate something incorrectly, you have a big problem.” Helsmoortel concludes with a small piece of advice: “Experiment with vibe coding but be careful. Above all, spend enough time on the right prompts to prevent unnecessary work and problems,” he concludes.